POSTMODERNISM happened when landlords, businessmen, brokers and bankers who owned the rest of the world had used new technologies to destroy the power of labour unions. Like owners of earlier empires they felt that history had ended because they and their sort could now dominate the world for ever. This indifference to most people’s wellbeing and taste appeared in the fashionable art of the wealthy. Critics called their period postmodern to separate it from the modern world begun by the Renaissance when most creative thinkers believed they could improve their community. Postmodernists had no interest in the future, which they expected to be an amusing rearrangement of things they already knew. Postmodernism did not survive disasters caused by “competitive exploitation of human and natural resources” in the twenty-first century.
MODERNISM developed when households became the largest units of government on earth and satellite co-operatives the largest off it. Once again time was split into three.
1 — Prehistory, before people lived in cities.
2 — History, when increasing numbers did so and city cultures shaped family life everywhere.
3 — Modernity, when the open intelligence network and powerplants made cities, nations, money and industrial power obsolete.
The simplicity of our modern divisions misled many into treating history as a painful interval between prehistoric tribal communities and modern co-operative ones. Others wanted to lump the historic and prehistoric eras together with a new calendar dated from the start of modernity, but disagreed about where to place the first year. Open intelligence gurus said the new era opened when the United States government let an early open intelligence network take over the Montana state education service in the 1980s. Others put it in the twenty-first century when the first modern powerplant synthesized a bowl of rice, a Samurai sword and a perfect Hokusai print on a Japanese peninsula — others when the first self-sustaining powerplant community took root in an Israeli kibbutz or in Salt Lake City or in the Vatican — others when the Islamic league began distributing powerplants to every Mohammedan nation on earth — others when the open intelligence network announced an accord with Japan through which it would sell any sixty people in the world their own powerplant if they owned an area of land able to support one.
I will end this far too lengthy note by quoting Pat O’Rafferty, a guru unknown to the open intelligence since he only speaks into the ears of friends: Modern housekeeping and modern gangrelling grew from more than two thousand years of decent people struggling to live as Jesus advised — struggling to do as they would be done by, not as lords and government officials did with them. The fact that Buddha (a former hereditary lord) and Confucius (an ex-government official) said the same centuries before Jesus proves they too were God’s excellent sons. Calendars were invented to help us keep appointments with each other. Using them to cut us off from a host of the dead is like using fire to burn a library instead of keeping it warm.
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The public eye presenters and telecom gurus and commanders broadcasting just now seem part of her conspiracy, but so do I.
The epidemic of military enthusiasm following the Ettrick — Northumbria draw was a worldwide male reaction to the omnicompetence of women who only needed them as inseminators. It is impossible to know what damage this epidemic would have done had it not been interrupted by another. The military threat had not been contrived by the conspirators. They merely tried to take advantage of it, fortunately for humanity.
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About great-grandmothers: Their gossip has been the only government and police the world has needed for more than a century. Among modern folk the very calm healthy intelligences of old women had most leisure to ponder and exchange news about their families: families whose total sum (if the gangrels are ignored) was humanity. Even loving families bred people who could only bear life by changing their world or finding another. A poet called this state divine discontent because good new things are made or discovered by those who tholed it. In historic times, however, neglect steered many potential makers and discoverers into crime, insanity or that legal compromise between the two, remorseless competition for power and property. In modern time the great-grandmothers ensured nobody was neglected by distributing among their daughters and grand-daughters news and suggestions which brought friends and opportunities to the most lonely and despairing. This news only reached men through remarks made by aunts, sisters or lovers, so like Wat most fighting men did not notice the power of the grandmothers.
When Wat had been carried off to the circus Kittock ran at once to Dryhope house and told the great-grannies why she thought this might have dangerous results. As he shook hands with folk from six continents in a Selkirk meadow the old women began a worldwide enquiry which spread through the solar system. Starting with grannies and mothers it came to involve everyone who knew anything about Meg Mountbenger and her colleagues. It lasted fifteen hours, those who directed it dozing in relays.
Meanwhile Wat, with a mixture of boredom and perplexity, saw a creative evolutionary opera called Homage to Ettrick. The overture was a firework display representing the explosion which created the universe and the origin of species. Glancing at the programme Wat saw four acts would follow depicting the heroic, religious, industrial and modern periods. He fell asleep halfway through the heroic period and was nudged awake by General Shafto near the end of the modern. Lulu Dancy was projecting a mirage of his last battle onto the dawn sky. In a pause after a crescendo of organ, trumpet and bagpipe blasts a Russian Orthodox church choir chanted “Do you surrender?” and Wat saw a mile-high coloured shadow of himself sing a splendid “No!” stab another shadow and dive down into the globe of the rising sun, preceded by a shining golden eagle pulling after it a banner like the tail of a meteor.
Then came the breakfast banquet served in a vast marquee with more speeches, back-slapping, kisses from visiting soldiers’ wives, congratulatory speeches and toasts. Beside him in the place of honour sat Meg-Delilah-Lulu in a silk dress as scarlet as her lipstick. It seemed impossible to talk with her but she kept filling his glass with champagne and giving him such lovingly mischievous glances that he gazed at her in puzzled wonder and hardly saw anyone else. Shortly before the breakfast ended she whispered, “I’ll be back soon,” slipped away and never returned. She was never seen again by anyone who admitted to knowing her. An hour later the foreign guests flew home while Wat, drunk for the first time in his life, raved and threatened violence through the circus caravans in a search for Meg Mountbenger. He was overpowered and carried to Ettrick Warrior house by Archie Crook Cot and the Boys’ Brigade. He arrived there unconscious.
By noon the old women had informed the open intelligence of the following. Meg Mountbenger and two public eye people and three biologists in the lunar Clavius laboratory were the K20 clique who had killed Haldane. They were still morally stupid, having kept in close touch with each other while pretending not to. By using vast amounts of public energy, then drugging him, they had infected Wat Dryhope with a harmless-seeming, highly contagious virus which could spread to all who talked with him. This virus must be a host to something more sinister since there could be no good reason for spreading it.